Microsoft OneApp

August 25th, 2009 Africa, hybrid media, m-banking, m-internet, mobile social software

Yesterday Microsoft announced the launch of OneApp.  It was developed by Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group.  UPG has been doing some great work on Shared PCs, digital literacy, and computers in education. This is one of UPG’s first big efforts in the mobile space.

Microsoft OneApp is a new software application that enables feature phones—commonly found in emerging markets—to access mobile apps like Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, and other popular apps and games. Now, people around the world who own feature phones will be able to do more and enjoy a better mobile experience with their existing phones. Microsoft OneApp will be offered initially through partners in emerging markets worldwide.

If you have seen or read any of my research in the past (particularly this newer stuff on mobile-centric internet use), you’ll quickly see why I am excited about OneApp. 

Smartphones are fantastic but remain out of reach of most people in the world. Feature phones, on the other hand, are more broadly accessible.  OneApp is small (150KB download), and runs on many of the world’s most popular handsets. It makes it much easier and cheaper, due to lower bandwidth requirements, for partners to offer and individuals to access the kinds of applications and web functionality that a lot of people with PCs take for granted. Furthermore, because it is flexible, I think we’ll see developers building locally-relevant applications, with the confidence that they can be used on the phones that so many people already have. 

Counselling via mobile social software

July 6th, 2009 Africa, conferences, hybrid media, m-health, m-internet, mobile social software

Drug counselling via MXit, a popular mobile chat program in South Africa.

From a longer article outlining Marlon Parker’s project, on mybroadband.co.za

MXIT, the cellphone instant messaging service best known for chatting teenagers, is now being used to help drug users on the Cape Flats kick their habit.
In the service, based in Bridgetown in Athlone, former drug users who counsel tik addicts use the messaging service as a primary method of support.

The article suggests that they are now counselling 6500 members of the community. I saw Marlon present an overview of this fascinating project at a recent UCT workshop on Researching Mobile Media in South Africa.  Marlon’s blog is here.

#iranelection

June 15th, 2009 hybrid media

I have been trying to follow the events in Iran as best I can, toggling between the mainstream media—mostly the New York Times via their wonderful website—blogs, and, of course, Twitter (#iranelection).  The main story, about the stolen election itself, is deadly serious for all of us, from the personal risks courageous individual protesters are taking, to the future political landscape of the Middle East.  

The 2nd-order story, about new media’s role in all of this, is also fascinating. (See Smart Mobs). Twitter is center stage here, and its power is winning over some influential participant-observers, like Andrew Sullivan. 

There is also another twist in the story, that of the users of a ‘new’ medium consciouslyasserting themselves, in aggregate, against the practices of an older medium.  I’m struck by how a reasonably large proportion of the twitter traffic is around issues like raising trendshare, and #cnnfail. That’s a lot of meta-positioning to accomplish <140 characters at a time, but it seems to have reached a self-sustaining crescendo with this geopolitical event.   The Economist’s Democracy in America had another take on these 2nd and 3rd twists:

It’s worth noting, though, that in this networked era, the “American response” need no longer be a crude synecdoche for the American government’s response, for good or ill. Those who truly want to know what’s happening on the ground in Iran as it transpires will eschew American papers—let alone the truly pathetic coverage coming in from the cable-news channels—and look to the Twitter stream, which Anglophone Iranians are using to communicate both with each other and the rest of the world. At the same time, technophiles here have been doing their best to get information back into the country—passing on the internet protocol addresses of proxy servers that can be used to circumvent state filtering, for example.

More controversial is an online effort led by new media strategist Josh Koster to bring down the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting site via a distributed denial-of-service attack. That site does indeed appear to have been down since last night—though whether as a result of the efforts of Twitter activists is unclear. While at first blush this is a fine case of crowd-sourced table turning, giving a censorious regime a taste of its own medicine, it also risks handing that regime ammunition—just as a too-strong statement from Mr Obama might—by buoying the narrative of an opposition influenced, aided, or even directed by hostile foreigners.

Perhaps not uncoincidentally, US-Iran relationships have a particularly tumultuous history in the mediated area.  A long time ago I wrote an undergraduate paper on the role of TV news in the Iranian Hostage Crisis.   I watched a lot of tape from the networks, and read good books by Gary Sick and Jeff Greenfield, among others. TV news was not a mere chronicler of the Iranian Hostage Crisis – the crisis itself was intertwined with TV. Ted Koppel started Nightline as special coverage of the crisis.  With no direct diplomatic links between the governments, leaked trial-balloons and pseudo-event stagecraft, offered nightly on the news, become an important channel of communication between the US government, the students, and the government in Iran. Meanwhile the relentless media coverage helped set the terms of debate for the 1980 presidetial election.

I’m not saying that 1979 TV = 2009 Twitter. The circumstances are quite different, and the level of global, grassroots, real-time participation in this story, via Twitter and the blogosphere, is something that was unimaginable in 1979.  I am, however, saying that the media, old or new, has been an actor in, rather than observer of, the US’s relationship with Iran for a long time. ’Coverage’ and ’attention’ have blurred into ‘action’ before.  

(palpably) absent presence

April 7th, 2009 conferences, hybrid media

I haven’t been travelling very much over the past few months–the Maputo W3C workshop was my first professional trip since December–so it ended up as the first conference I’ve attended with this kind of tag scrawled on the flipchart. 

Tweets emerging out of a conference don’t function all that differently than the more established practice of liveblogging, but it’s a bit odd to be aware, in almost real time, of (for example) who else is not at the conference, but following it.

There are some great advantages to these dispatches–the week before, the tables were turned and had I learned a lot following tweets at a conference I could not attend–however it does seem that the temptation to tweet, or to follow other’s tweets, may draw people’s attention further from the community in the room towards the imagined, virtual, overlapping communities to which they each belong. 

Kenneth Gergen considered the implications of Absent Presence long before Twitter was a glimmer in anyone’s eye. However, as I think John Traxler mentions, Gergen’s chapter may worth another look; it seems to apply very, very well to this newest of tools/disruptions.

texting Julliet

December 13th, 2008 Africa, hybrid media, text messaging

A nice story of love and courtship in Nigeria, via SMS

My friend Thomas Alo had two problems. Though he had been friends with Juliet, a colleague, for years, he hadn’t had the guts to tell her that he loved her and wanted to marry her. His second problem was that he had refused to buy a cellphone.

One day, I sat him down and told him that if he had a phone his problems with Juliet would be over. He asked me how. I told him that he could send her a text message, telling her he loved her and wanted to marry her. He said love affairs were not conducted through text messages.

Later I put pressure on him for a while; he eventually decided to act on my advice and went to buy a cellphone. Rather than face Juliet, who worked in the same office as him, he sent her an SMS declaring his feelings and requesting a date.

Into(context), Kiva.org and an MMS application

November 7th, 2008 Africa, hybrid media, microenterprise

I have been meaning to mention this project by Into(context) for a while. It has a great website, with lots links, images, and documentation that exceeds that of most ICTD pilots. 

Into(context) is a design research project developed by the Design for Sustainability group of Delft University of Technology and funded by Microsoft Research’s Digital Inclusion Initiative. The project reflects the initiative’s goal to understand what role information & communication technology (ICT) can play in creating solutions for overcoming the myriad barriers facing the developing world.

During six months in 2006 design researchers worked directly with Kiva.org and four of its existing microfinance partners in Uganda and Kenya to develop an appropriate technology solution to facilitate the use of their online lending platform. The solution needed to meet the needs of their users and be congruous with the context of East Africa.

The outcome was the development of a cell phone based application dubbed ‘The Miracle Mobile Solution’ or MiMoSo. The MiMoSo effectively eliminated some of the most significant barriers facing the staff in delivering content to the Kiva website. Critical partner information including text and images, can now be sent via Multi-Media Message Service. It allows MFIs the ability to expand their technology resources affordably to accommodate their operations with Kiva. Users submit updates directly over the mobile network without the need for an internet connection. 

The design of this project interests me, as it has been developed to suit a particular niche, to provide an the organizational interface between the loan officer of an MFI and Kiva itself. Driven by MMS, of all things, it is another example of a hybrid process–through it, images and text which start their lives on mobiles in the developing world end up appearing on the PC screens of would-be Kiva users in the developed world.

Nokia life tools

November 4th, 2008 Agriculture, hybrid media, India, m-learning, text messaging

Nokia announced its intentions to provide agricultural information and education content to lower-end feature handsets in India.  The service, called Nokia Life Tools, will wrap an SMS data channel with a graphic-rich interface.   Reuters Marketlight is the content partner for the agriculture side.  Idea Cellular is the first operator to sign up. OnMobile, another Indian mobile content provider, is also on-board, contributing astrology and ringtone services. 

Over time, it will be interesting to see the relative take-up of the various instrumental and expressive services on offer.  In the meantime, think the fusion of a graphic interface and the SMS channel is particularly notable for developing-world contexts. (Also see the mobile-XL browser).  These forms bypass the need for a GPRS-enabled handset or data plan, and stretch the capabilities of the ‘humble’ SMS. 

Ken Banks at kiwanja.net has a longer write-up.

Use of mobiles by South African youth

October 22nd, 2008 Africa, hybrid media, m-internet, Uncategorized

While at MobileActive 2008, I met Tino Kreutzer, an MA student in the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town.  He is in the midst of gathering some really interesting data on patterns of mobile/mobile internet use among low-income teens in urban Cape Town.  Preliminary results are up on his website.

The pilot suggests that the majority of urban South Africans in this age group can and do access the Internet via their phones (83% were found to so on a typical day). The popularity of instant messaging and other Internet applications within this group suggests that their use of the Internet differs from those whose access is primarily via desktop devices. This finding has significant implications for mobile media and learning applications, as does the fact that a majority of students also reported gaming on their phones on a typical day (53%).

The Economist: mobiles in humanitarian relief

August 5th, 2007 Africa, hybrid media, m-banking, text messaging

A recent piece in the Economist highlights the increasing importance of information technologies, particularly mobile communication technologies, to international aid and disaster relief efforts.  Most of the piece details the nuts-and-bolts of logistics, for which mobile ICTs are clearly a helpful new arrival. Responders can stay in touch and better coordinate their efforts. So too can displaced or fragmented families, who can find each other via electronic databases.

The article contains two other elements which make more sweeping claims about the “shifting balance” or reconfiguration of relationships between the aid community and those they are trying to help.  The more grounded example is that of the role of large remittance flows via m-payments systems and shop-at-a-distance sites like Makuru.com. I think this raises an important point: as families with overseas members become increasingly connected via mobiles and other ICTs, there are real opportunities for micro-level, family-centric responses to macro-level events like floods and famines.

The second point is less clear-cut.  The article leads with a quote from the Horn of Africa, in the form of an SMS delivered to UN officials in London and Nairobi. 

“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.”

It’s a great anecdote–though perhaps still more aspirational than descriptive–which the author(s) use to assert that “a familiar flow of authority, from rich donor to grateful recipient, had been reversed.” It will be interesting to watch how, over time, donors and other actors in the humanitarian space integrate mediated feedback and participitory input from ‘recipients’ into relief response. 

In the meantime, we can draw a different theme from the anecdote: the author of the SMS found the contact numbers at an internet café. And, conversely, you and I are reading the quote via the internet again.   This hybridity of media—an intermingling of SMS messages and internet content—is something I expect we’ll see more of in the developing world.

MobilED as hybrid media

July 27th, 2007 Africa, hybrid media, m-learning

Shareideas.org  and the ICT4D section of the World Bank’s Development Gateway both recently highlighted an application called MobilED.  It is a mobile-learning application, piloted in South Africa, which allows students to (a) query Wikipedia via SMS messages (b) hear the results of the query played back to them as audio text and (c) post new entries to their own class’s wiki by recording audio off their handsets.

I haven’t seen the system first hand, but I think it is interesting for two reasons:

1) It is a hybrid media form, which complicates all the theorizing some of us like to do about text messages, mobile calls, internet sites, etc.  What is it? A web application? A mobile application? A mobile web application? My bet is the kids don’t care as long as it helps them learn and is easy to use.

2) Its hybridity accomplishes something still relatively rare: it breaks down the walls between web content and SMS content. In doing so, it demonstrates a way in which some rich, dynamic internet content can be made accessible to (and can be created by) communities using relatively affordable & common basic mobile handsets. Since the worldwide ratio of mobile users to internet users is roughly 2:1, this is a good thing for both groups.